1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to electronic methods and systems for characterizing one or more microorganisms or DNA fragments thereof. More particularly, the disclosure relates to methods and systems for characterizing one or more microorganisms or DNA fragments thereof based on a comparison of microorganism DNA information with information in one or more databases.
2. Background Art
Characterizing microorganisms may be desirable for several reasons. For example, it may be desirable to characterize or identify one or more microorganisms or microorganism species that is or is thought to be a cause of infection in an animal. If the microorganisms or species are known, such information may be used to treat the animal.
Computerized systems and methods that have an ability to identify a specific pathogenic microorganism have been developed. Such presently existing products, however, generally require significant processing time, e.g., on the order of several days, making the use of such systems impractical in clinical applications, because by the time any results are obtained, the infection may no longer be treatable. In addition, results obtained by such currently available software packages may not be useful to doctors or other health care professionals, because the results may require additional software or specially trained researchers to interpret the results of the microorganism identification, to manually determine a suitable course of treatment, and to obtain therapy resistance information associated with the microorganism for use by the physician in recommending a treatment. In addition, such systems may only identify one microorganism or species at a time, and information for the particular microorganism generally must be stored in a database. In other words, the methods and systems generally cannot identify or characterize microorganisms that have not previously been identified and that do not have associated information stored in a database.
Accordingly, improved electronic methods and systems for characterizing or identifying one or more microorganisms in an efficient manner are desired. The methods and systems preferably do not require an Internet connection for an extended period of time.